Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various telecommunication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, and broadcasts. Typical wireless communication systems may employ multiple-access technologies capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available system resources (e.g., bandwidth, transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access technologies include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, single-carrier frequency divisional multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems, and time division synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA) systems.
These multiple access technologies have been adopted in various telecommunication standards to provide a common protocol that enables different wireless devices to communicate on a municipal, national, regional, and even global level. An example of an emerging telecommunication standard is High Speed Packet Access (HSPA). HSPA is a set of enhancements to the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) mobile standard promulgated by Third Generation Partnership Project (3 GPP).
In HSPA, transmit power for high speed dedicated physical control channel (HS-DPCCH) is allocated before power allocation for an enhanced dedicated channel (E-DCH) at a user equipment (UE). The UE allocates power for the HS-DPCCH at each transmit time interval assuming a worst case transmission of acknowledgement (ACK)/non-acknowledgment (NAK) and channel quality indicator (CQI) data such that power may be allocated to HS-DPCCH in some scenarios where ACK/NAK and CQI data are not transmitted in a given transmission time interval (TTI). Allocating power to channels that have no data to transmit, in this regard, can cause unnecessary consumption of power headroom. When the UE is at a cell edge, and thus operating using high HS-DPCCH power, avoiding unnecessary consumption of power headroom may be desirable.